Applicant(s)

Size of team/newsroom:small

Categories:

Description

This data portal was built to supplement a series of stories looking at the severity of racial profiling by police during traffic stops in Connecticut. (Stories here: http://trafficstops.trendct.org/) This app allowed local readers to see the overall trends statewide, but let them drill down into police departments and individual officers. Visitors could see whether minorities were pulled over more disproportionately and searched compared to others. They could see if police in their area were more likely to pull drivers over for non-moving violations. Ultimately, if they looked deep enough, they could see how a handful of police officers could skew the rate for their entire department and even the state.

What makes this project innovative? What was its impact?

This project was based on 840,000 rows of data (and 29 columns of factors). We had to figure out what was most important to readers and present it to them without overwhelming them. The state is required to collect and display the data in its raw form but they aren't required to present it in a way that makes it easy for residents to explore the results.

Technologies used for this project:

We used django on the front end, as well as D3 and highcharts.js. For the data analysis, we used R and Python.